Cover-ups, Politics, and Forensics

It would be naive to think medical examiners--or even forensic anthropologists--operate
in a political vacuum. The themes of cover-up and politics in forensics
has minor and major harmonics.

Dr. Michael M. Baden, former chief medical examiner for New York City,
addresses this subject in his book, Unnatural
Death--Confessions of a Medical Examiner. In the following passage,
he discusses some of the pressures brought to bear on coroners and medical
examiners in the ordinary course of events in any city:

"The public noticed when people died in police custody . . . If medical
examiners diagnosed those deaths in custody as heart failures, they enraged
the families. If we said they were due to excessive force, we enraged the
cops." (Baden, pg.
52).

"Over the years there is a buildup of cases in which the ME has been
too independent to suit the tastes of the politicians, prosecutors, defense
attorneys, and insurance companies. He makes enemies in powerful places.
The child of an influential family dies of an overdose and the family does
not want the cause on the death certificate. The wife of a politician commits
suicide and the husband wants it declared a natural death. Truth is not
the criterion. If we do our job right, one group of people or another will
be offended, and we can become a political liability in the next election,"
(Baden, pg. 53). Dr.
Baden does not mention the corollary: if the medical examiner diagnoses
the "right" cause of death, he can make friends in powerful places.

Several forensic pathologists who criticized the autopsy performed on
President Kennedy felt the consequences on their profession. President
Kennedy's body was illegally taken from the Parkland Hospital Secret Service
agents and delivered to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where an autopsy was
performed by the military doctors. While the autopsy was in progress, generals,
admirals, and cabinet members milled around in the autopsy room (Baden,
pg. 12). Vice PO Box 15430 Wedgwood Station, Seattle, WA 98115
orders on how the autopsy was to be performed, telling the pathologist,
a junior officer, not to dissect the bullet wound in President Kennedy's
back.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist, was forthright and outspoken
when he gave his opinion about the professionalism of the autopsy. According
to Baden, Wecht called the Kennedy autopsy "orchestrated incompetence"
(Baden, pg. 23).

Dr. Wecht himself wrote a book Cause
of Death, in which he discusses the Kennedy case and several other
notorious questionable death cases. On the autopsy of President Kennedy,
Dr. Wecht says: "If they had dissected this wound, they would have been
able to trace the bullet's path through the body," (Wecht,
pg. 25). Nor was the brain dissected. The complete incompetence of the
military doctors was magnified when navy commander James J. Humes, a military
pathologist who did much of the physical examination of the president's
body, announced months later that he had burned his original autopsy notes
in the fireplace his home on Sunday, November 24. "This violates every
rule of forensic pathology and official medical-legal investigation," said
Dr. Wecht. (Wecht, pg. 26).

After Dr. Wecht made his criticisms, he began seeing professional doors
close. "Invitations to participate as a faculty member in the prestigious
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology were no longer offered to me. There
is no doubt that if I had kept my mouth shut and toed the government line
in the Kennedy case, I would have been appointed to many more medicolegal
positions directly or indirectly controlled by the US government. I have
also gotten the cold shoulder from several national pathology organizations
since I became an outspoken critic of the Warren Commission." (Wecht,
pg. 44).

Dr. Baden reports that Milton Helpern, the highly respected chief medical
examiner of New York City and the soul of diplomacy, suggested in an interview
that the government should have called in competent Medical Examiners to
assist Humes. Some of the leading MEs in the country were in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and New York. In fact, Earl Rose, the Dallas coroner, was
a trained forensic pathologist. As a result of the interview, Helpern thought,
his name was removed from a list of lecturers to the Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology (a federal training program for pathologists)." (Baden,
pg. 8)

When citizens are routinely murdered by their governments, as Argentineans
were murdered during the rule of the military junta between 1976 and 1983,
civilian coroners and medical examiners played an integral part in the
murders through cover-up.

Intelligence networks, and military and police death squads in Argentina
rounded up more than ten thousand people during those years, and took them
to secret detention centers. Many of the disappeareds were tortured and
murdered. While some bodies were dumped in the ocean, or the river, others
were burned in open pits.

In most cases, however, military or police squads delivered the bodies
of their victims to municipal morgues, where the police surgeon gave them
a brisk examination. Many morgue workers were well aware of the atrocities
committed around them. Army trucks would arrive at morgues late at night,
carrying bodies, often mutilated and bearing signs of torture. Officers
ordered the morgue workers not to perform autopsies and simply register
the bodies as 'N.N.' for 'no name.' These were usually buried in unmarked
graves." (Joyce & Stover,
pg. 224). Clyde Snow traveled to Argentina to recover and identify these
poor remains.

"Of all the forms of murder, none is more monstrous than that committed
by a state against its own citizens. And of all murder victims, those of
the state are the most helpless and vulnerable since the very entity to
which they have entrusted their lives and safety becomes their killer.
When the state murders, the crime is planned by powerful men. They use
the same cold rationality and administrative efficiency that they might
bring to the decision to wage a campaign to eradicate a particularly obnoxious
agricultural pest.

"The homicidal state shares one trait with the solitary killer--like
all murderers, it trips on its own egoism and drops a trail of clues which,
when properly collected, preserved, and analyzed are as damning as a signed
confession left in the grave.

"The great mass murderers of our time have accounted for no more than
a few hundred victims. In contrast, states that have chosen to murder their
own citizens can usually count their victims by the carload lot. As for
motive, the state has no peers, for it will kill its victim for a careless
word, a fleeting thought, or even a poem."
--Forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, speaking before the May, 1984
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as
quoted by Joyce & Stover,
pg. 217.

Many people who distrust the mainstream media have turned to alternate
news sources, some of which are Internet based. Unfortunately, many
of these alternate sources of news simply promote an alternate series
of lies. These alternate lies are of course dressed up as "exposÚs."
But you can easily tell the phonies from the real thing. The information
in the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum is an acid test.

Does your news source promote Mike McNulty's video, Waco: The Rules
of Engagement or wring its hands because the Davidian law suit against
the government failed? (See Waco
Documentary Is A Hoax! and Waco
Suits for Waco Suckers.)
Does your alternate news source carry promotional pieces about rebuilding
the Davidian church in Waco and mouth nice words about "healing"?
(See The Cover-up Church.)

Remember, since ancient times, inquiries into questionable deaths have
started with the bodies of the victims. If your news source won't
give you an honest and full account of the forensic information on Waco,
or if it does not have a link to the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum ...
your alternate news has failed a fundamental acid test.